Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?

Michael Dorris

Categorized in : Order Perception Historical

At different stages in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at heart the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds

loyalty grief love

Grandfather was well known for being stubborn in his ideas. For instance... you had to go to sleep facing east so that you would be ready to greet the sun when it returned.

grandparent sleep ideas

My son will forever travel through a moonless night with only the roar of wind for company.... A drowning man is not separated from the lust for air by a bridge of thought—he is one with it—and my son, conceived and grown in an ethanol bath, lives each day in the act of drowning. For him there is no shore.

men night son

To be known for one's saddest story is not the road to notoriety... by Michael Dorris

To be known for one's saddest story is not the road to notoriety anyone would willingly choose.

saddest notoriety stories

Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered. by Michael Dorris

Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered.

asks

I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious.

humility native-american past

Here are two facts that should not both be true: by Michael Dorris

Here are two facts that should not both be true:

organization men years

I watched the way you watch when you know you want to remember. by Michael Dorris

I watched the way you watch when you know you want to remember.

memories watches life

We Americans are tempted to distinguish ourselves from other current and former inhabitants of this planet by assuming that we are ruled by progress.

currents progress assuming

The necessity of loyalty between friends, the responsibility that the strong owe the infirm, the illusion of ill-gotten gain, the rewards of hard work, honesty, and trust-these are enduring truths glimpsed and judged first through the imagination, first through art.

loyalty strong art

Dinner is to a day what dessert is to dinner. by Michael Dorris

Dinner is to a day what dessert is to dinner.

dessert dinner eating